iTunes too many computers authorized? Fix??

Crazy frustrating. I have a laptop of my own and a desktop computer at work and when I went to my parents house to share some movies on their new AppleTV, it complained that I’d already authorized five computers with my account and wouldn’t proceed. Sucks! How do I fix this?

As you now know, iTunes and the iTunes Store are multi-computer friendly, which is great when you want to share your purchased music, audio books, movies and other video material across your work, your home, your AppleTV, and so on. Problem is, you only get to authorize five computers and once you hit that limit, you’re out of luck. So if you had a couple of laptops, two AppleTV units and a desktop server, you might not be able to enjoy your purchased iTunes Store content on your work computer too. No way around it.
On the other hand, it appears that the authorizations are tied to system serial numbers, so if you replace a computer with a new one and forget to deauthorize the old computer, it’s going to take up one of those precious five slots even though it’s completely inactive. It’d be cool if Apple kept track and after six months, say, of a given authorized machine never checking in with the server to see if it’s still authorized, it automatically deauthorized that device, but that’s not how it works today.
In fact, the only way to clean out any of the five auth slots is to wait until you’re completely full and getting just the error message you’re seeing, then deauth every computer and reauthorize them one-by-one. That’s what I’m going to show you how to do. It’s easy!
I’ll show you the sequence on my PC system running Microsoft Windows 7 too, so you can see how it works there, though the sequence is 100% identical if you’re a pure Mac user finding the same problem.
First off, here’s a movie I’ve copied onto the Win7 PC and want to watch:

Quite cute, and doubly so if you have kids that like Monsters, Inc.. When I click on the “play” button, I’m asked to authorize the computer. No surprise there:

Sometimes ya just ain’t lucky and the servers are busy…

No worries. I wait a few minutes and try again, just to find out when I enter the account password that I’ve already authorized five computers on my iTunes Store account and am maxed out:

It’s surprising that this error “you cannot authorize more than 5 computers” doesn’t offer up much useful information on how actually fix the problem, but that’s why you have me on the case, right?
Click on “OK” then go to the iTunes Store within iTunes. Now, on the top right you’ll see your email address (if you don’t, log in first). Choose “Account”:

The account summary has some useful information, including your payment method and billing address. More importantly it has a button labelled “Deauthorize All”:

You want to click on the “Deauthorize All” button (and yes, you will have to re-authorize each and every computer that you want to have access to your iTunes Store account. But it’s really easy, you’ll see)…

Yup, that’s what we want to do. Click on “Deauthorize all computers” and…

Done. That’s it.
Now, on each computer, you can authorize them with your iTunes Store account by going into iTunes and choosing “Authorize This Computer…” from the “Store” menu:

Enter your password properly on the subsequent window…

You’ve just authorized the computer. Better, it also shows you a running count so you can tell how close to that magic number 5 you reach:

Oh, and that movie? Now it’ll play just fine…

Hope that helps you get a handle on the authorizations tied to your iTunes Store account!

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I do have a lot to say, and questions of my own for that matter, but first I'd like to say thank you, Dave, for all your helpful information by
buying you a cup of coffee!

So glad I found this post! Two old laptops have since gone bye bye, yet they remained authorized for my iTunes accounts. My kids have been driving me crazy to set up home sharing, but I couldn’t because of the maxed out number of computers iTunes claimed I had for my account. A quick keyword search led me to you, and your instructions to fix this issue are flawless. Now, I have happy kids AND all the new computers properly authorized! Thanks so much.

Okay I get what you say but what if the case is that you did not knew this before now … and all the computers that have been used for the authorisation (sorry my english) do not exist anymore? Me and my mom have had a lot of problems with computers going down and have then had new computers and now I don’t know what to do … but help would be more than just very apreciated.
Sandra from Denmark.

Ken, I believe the fix for that is to choose “Add To Library…” from the “File” menu in iTunes and let it rescan for tracks. Be aware that it’s possible it’ll copy them into your iTunes Music folder, eating up a lot of disk space. If that happens, just delete the originals. And if you already have them in the right place, this should fix things.
Oh, one more thing! Also choose “Check for Available Downloads” off the “Store” menu in iTunes too.
Good luck. iTunes is a mixed blessing as a media management tool.

I’ve used this feature (deauthorize all) several times. But you can only do this once a year!!!
Very handy if your ipod dies or your laptop is stolen.
You can deauthorize and reauthorize each of the 5 computers many times but the “all” option is once annually.
To “fix” the problem of the limited (5) authorizations, I routinely deauthorize my netbook in favour of another computer (and reverse the process when needed).
With an iphone, ipad, work and home computer and a netbook, let alone the media centre I run the at the edge. I think apple should extend the limit if they truely wish the users to have access to their own stuff.

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